Maybe the problem isn’t that employees have become less loyal. Maybe the deal changed.
We spend a lot of time talking about employee engagement. Why people leave. Why they stay. Why they’re burnt out. Why they don’t seem as committed as they once were. Why employers are struggling to attract people, even when the salary is competitive. Somewhere along the way, the conversation usually turns to loyalty and I hear some version of people just aren’t loyal anymore.
But I’m not convinced employees suddenly woke up one morning and decided loyalty was overrated. I think something much bigger has changed. The relationship between employer and employee has changed, and we haven’t really stopped to talk about what that means.
There has always been a deal
I’m not talking about the employment contract. That tells us what someone will be paid, their hours of work, their leave entitlements and the legal obligations sitting around the employment relationship. All important things, obviously, but it doesn’t tell us much about the relationship itself.
Alongside the written employment contract, there has always been another agreement. An unwritten one. You give me your time, capability, effort and commitment and, in return, I give you more than a wage.
For much of the twentieth century, that exchange was reasonably well understood. Employees worked hard, demonstrated loyalty and often expected to build a long career with one employer. Employers provided relative stability, development, career progression and an expectation that loyalty would be recognised over time. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but both sides had a reasonably clear idea of the deal.
I’m not sure we do anymore.
Employers changed the deal too
This is where the conversation about employee loyalty gets interesting, because organisations have always made decisions based on their commercial interests. And they should. Businesses have to remain viable. Markets change, commodity prices move, technology changes the way work is done, contracts are won and lost and economic conditions shift. Sometimes businesses restructure, sometimes roles disappear and sometimes people are made redundant. That’s commercial reality.
But those decisions also teach employees something about the employment relationship.
If you’ve worked in mining in Western Australia for any length of time, you’ve probably watched this cycle more than once. The market tightens, projects slow and workforces reduce. Conditions improve, recruitment ramps up again and suddenly everyone is competing for the same people. The commercial logic makes sense, but think about what the employee learns from experiencing that cycle: my employment exists while it continues to make commercial sense for my employer.
That’s not necessarily criticism. It’s reality. But once employees understand that, something changes. If an organisation is allowed to make decisions based on what is best for the business, why are we surprised when employees make decisions based on what is best for them?
That isn’t necessarily a lack of loyalty. It might simply be a clearer understanding of the deal.
Employees are doing the same calculation
Businesses routinely ask whether a person adds value, whether they’re productive, whether they’re worth the investment and whether the organisation is getting the return it needs from a particular role. Nobody considers those questions unreasonable. They’re part of running a business.
Employees are now asking their own version. Is this job worth what it asks of me? Is this leader someone I want to work for? Am I learning anything? Do I have a future here? Does the flexibility compensate for the salary? Does the salary compensate for the roster? Do I feel respected? What am I giving up to work here, and what am I getting in return?
Or, in considerably less HR language: is the juice worth the squeeze?
And that calculation isn’t happening once a year when the engagement survey lands in someone’s inbox. It’s happening all the time. A conversation with their supervisor. A roster change. Being recognised for doing good work — or watching it go unnoticed. Seeing someone promoted. Watching how a colleague is treated when they make a mistake. Having an idea listened to. Being told development matters and then watching the training budget disappear. Every one of those experiences adds information to the employee’s understanding of the deal.
The equation isn’t just about money
Pay matters. Of course it does, particularly when the cost of living is biting and people have mortgages, rent, children and financial commitments. But reducing the employment relationship to remuneration misses a huge part of what people actually experience at work.
Trust matters. Respect matters. Good leadership, clarity, growth, autonomy and flexibility matter. Feeling that your contribution actually counts matters. These aren’t nice little extras sitting around the edges of the employment relationship; they influence how people experience the work itself.
I’ve seen people doing physically demanding work, on twelve-hour shifts in remote parts of Western Australia, who are highly engaged. The work isn’t easy, but they know what’s expected of them. They trust their supervisor. They’re respected, their contribution is recognised and they understand how their work matters. I’ve also seen people sitting in comfortable offices, earning reasonable money, who have mentally checked out. The workload isn’t necessarily the issue. The relationship is.
Which is why I think we need to be careful when we talk about engagement as something an organisation can somehow give employees. Engagement is better understood as an outcome — an employee’s response to the experience and relationship they have with their work and their employer. When people believe the exchange is fair and worthwhile, they’re far more likely to invest themselves in it. When they stop believing that, discretionary effort can disappear long before their resignation arrives.
We’re also asking more from work
There’s another part of this conversation we shouldn’t ignore. We expect considerably more from workplaces than previous generations did. Employment once primarily needed to provide an income, reasonable conditions and perhaps the opportunity to progress. Today we also talk about purpose, belonging, flexibility, psychological safety, wellbeing, development, inclusion, meaningful work, connection and coaching.
Many of those expectations are entirely reasonable. Some are fundamental to a healthy workplace. But collectively they represent a significant change in what we expect employment to provide, and I think this is where some of the tension sits.
Employers are saying, we’re paying you to do a job. Employees are saying, yes, but what is my experience of doing that job? Neither question is ridiculous, but they’re not the same question.
Unless we start talking about the gap between them, we’ll keep diagnosing the consequences instead: turnover, disengagement, absenteeism, difficulty recruiting, poor performance, burnout and conflict. We measure all of these things, but perhaps we need to spend more time looking at the relationship underneath them.
What are you actually offering people?
This is where EVP can become a glossy exercise if we’re not careful. An Employee Value Proposition isn’t a recruitment tagline or a list of benefits on your careers page. It’s the exchange. If I give this organisation a significant chunk of my working life, what can I reasonably expect in return? And equally, if the organisation employs me, what can it reasonably expect from me?
That requires more honesty than most values statements. What do you genuinely promise your people beyond paying them correctly? What does commitment look like here? What do you expect employees to contribute beyond simply completing their tasks? What should someone be able to say they gained after spending five years working for you?
Then there are the harder questions. What happens when someone makes a mistake? What happens when the business is under financial pressure? What happens when an employee disagrees with their manager, raises a concern or decides to leave? Because your social contract isn’t really defined by what you say when everything is going well. It becomes much clearer when things get difficult.
People don’t learn what an organisation values from the values statement on the wall. They learn it from what leaders consistently choose to protect, reinforce and tolerate.
Which brings us back to trust
We sometimes talk about trust as though it’s built through communication workshops and leaders being more vulnerable. Those things may contribute, but trust is also incredibly practical. Do you do what you said you would do? Do your decisions match what you tell employees matters? Do the same standards apply when they become inconvenient? Do employees know what to expect from you?
When words and actions line up consistently, people learn they can trust the organisation. When they don’t, people learn something too — and they adjust their own behaviour accordingly.
This is why I think we’ve got some of the conversation about loyalty backwards. We talk about loyalty as though it’s something an employee should bring with them, almost as a personal characteristic: good employees are loyal. But why would loyalty exist independently of the quality of the relationship?
People stay where the exchange continues to work for them. They stay because they’re developing, because they feel valued, because they enjoy the people they work with, because they trust their leader, because the roster works for their life, because the opportunity still makes sense or because they believe there is something worth staying for.
Loyalty isn’t the starting point. It’s an outcome.
Today’s employees may simply be less willing to give it away before an organisation has demonstrated that it deserves it. Show me that development isn’t something you only mention during recruitment. Show me that your values still apply when meeting them becomes inconvenient. Show me how you treat people when they make mistakes, how leaders behave when they’re under pressure, what happens when someone raises a concern and how you treat people when they leave. Then ask me for commitment.
This is The Real Work
We can keep designing engagement initiatives, rewriting values, adding benefits and talking about retention, but none of those things will compensate for an employment relationship that doesn’t feel fair.
Culture, engagement and employee experience aren’t separate from the relationship between an organisation and its people. They’re how that relationship shows up in the everyday experience of work. That’s why The Real Work isn’t about another HR initiative. It’s about the behaviour of leaders, the clarity people have around their role, whether systems support them to do good work, whether expectations match reality and whether the organisation does what it says it will do.
Every organisation has a social contract, whether you’ve deliberately designed it or not.
So perhaps the better question isn’t are our employees loyal? It’s this: if every employee in your organisation had complete freedom to choose again tomorrow, would they still choose you?
Not because leaving feels risky, because they have bills to pay or because another opportunity hasn’t appeared yet. Would they choose to continue the relationship because what they receive from it still feels worth what they’re being asked to give?
That’s a much more useful conversation about retention.
The goal isn’t to create workplaces where nobody ever leaves. People will leave. Careers change, lives change and businesses change. The goal should be to create an employment relationship where the exchange is understood, expectations run both ways and the promises made are reflected in the everyday experience of work.
So that if someone gives your organisation five years of their working life, they can look back and genuinely say, that was time well spent.
If we can create more workplaces where people believe that, we might not need to work quite so hard at manufacturing engagement. It becomes the natural result of a relationship people believe is worth continuing.